


Shred of Blue

by ZCreates (Zorav)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Interpretation, Surrealist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 07:50:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14930189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zorav/pseuds/ZCreates
Summary: "Death was the only thing the world had ever been kind enough to promise. Assassin or farmer, beggar or prince, there was nothing that bound the living together quite the way death did. It was a finality, the end of a solemn song, a rite of passage for those who had earned it. When the time came, it was no more than a cold price to be paid when the reaper came knocking, the fate in his hands presented like a gift for the weary. There was never a word that could be said for those who crossed the line, for in death, all creatures were the same."Written for a Dragon Age Inquisition zine, a interpretation short story based on the bard song "Shred of Blue".





	Shred of Blue

Death was the only thing the world had ever been kind enough to promise. Assassin or farmer, beggar or prince, there was nothing that bound the living together quite the way death did. It was a finality, the end of a solemn song, a rite of passage for those who had earned it. When the time came, it was no more than a cold price to be paid when the reaper came knocking, the fate in his hands presented like a gift for the weary. There was never a word that could be said for those who crossed the line, for in death, all creatures were the same.

Once, death had hardly been a notion in his mind. He’d lived peacefully, unburdened by the thought of mortality or what it meant for a person to die. The days had been quietly composed of nothing more than the sweeping fields of grain and a pleasant warmth of contentment. In a way, it could’ve easily been a picture of perfection, something painted into books when someone tried to define this notion of peace, of quiet, of an existence that was timeless. 

He hadn’t been prepared to lose that, nothing in his mind that could have saved him from the darkness that spread like a living poison.

He’d walked a long way from the time where he didn’t think about the meaning of leaving this world, before it was part of the job that required him to shed who he’d been. With years tucking themselves away in moments, the days before the war were just foggy memories slowly drifting away. He still saw flashes of them when the endless run came to a walk, taking him back to a lifetime where the sunsets that painted the sky in red didn’t remind him of blood, where the cloudy grays didn’t remind him of steel. 

Those quiet evenings were the ones bittersweet in many a soldier's song, days passed on a little house on the plain, simple meals with a simple job – a place that the restless would leave and the dreamers would come back to when they were ready to die. For many, they could resist the call of adventure, of the grand, forever smitten by the comfort of the mundane. Some carried the regret of wondering, a curiosity that was never too much to bear.

He carried the opposite - the darkness that came with falling to temptation.

It’d taken a mere trumpet in the town’s square, a call of glory and of bigger dreams, for him to sign his name on a paper to become someone else. Aspirations of grandeur clouded visions he’d once kept, tainted the future with what he could be in a different world. The lonely notes that day, echoing in his ears, were the last time he’d been more than just a number, words he’d never be able to take back. It was there that the life he’d made cracked apart. 

At first, picking up the blade had been like any other skill to be learned - frustrating, unwieldy, daunting. And yet, the challenge of it thrilled him, drove the blood up his veins as he felt its weight, once cumbersome, start to flow in his hands. Once unthinkable, it became too easy, something done without reflection. It created a path before him to continue walking down, moving further and further from where he’d begun.

Everything had consumed him so that he could look at nothing but what was before him. Once just a bedtime story, that is what he became, no more than the extension of his blade. From Inquisitor to the Nightingale, the job was undefined, unclean, acts committed in the cloak of an endless night. With each body he needed less of a reason, less of a justification for what he was told must be done.

Before he knew it, it no longer mattered. Bodies that were deemed to drop were placed in the ground with only the glimmer of the respect the once living deserved. Home became just a dream during the night when he waited for the next raven, hearing everything but nothing. 

He was just a pawn in a game called war, and he was fully aware of it. He was a player on the board while the gods above him rained fire upon them all. There was no prairie, no sky, no noble end when he was dancing in a graveyard filled with bones and blood.

He’d lost the color of the sky, of freedom - lost it so long ago that it was a color he hardly recognized. It was no longer something he could see in his mind, barely remembered the words to describe it, couldn’t remember the feeling that it had created.

He missed her most of all, watching him with that clear gaze as he stood on the edge, balanced on the choice of home and dream. The words she’d said when he thought back to that moment were gone, just spaces in the memory where sound should have been. Instead, the scene was filled with the pattering of rain on leaves, the mist curling around the road that stretched out to the future. In the memory, the gray drenched out the sky until the brightest thing in the world were her eyes, saddened that nothing could bring him back, looking as if she already knew - that she’d already lost him to the war.

He could see her slim fingers tucking back her blonde locks, strands falling out from behind her ear, and he wanted to catch them, to make that image perfect again. Her tears melded with the rain, her last protest, and he turned from her, knowing in a way that these dreams would never lead him back there.

He died that day - the day he set upon that road filled with darkened dreams and left her behind. Now he laid in a pool of red, staining the floor while waiting for the inevitable, and he knew there was no way he could get back to fulfill all the promises he’d made. He could do nothing more than stare at the sky, wishing and willing for the gray to lift, to see the color of her eyes once again.

He wondered what the years had done, if she’d find him still when enough time had come and gone. What would she do, what could she be, now that he’d never come back again? He hoped, desperately, that it be enough to say that he was sorry, to not speak of the darkness, to just vanish in that shred of blue.

* * *

 

She remembered the day he left, the way his back was to her, outlined by the setting sun. There was that scarf around his shoulders that almost masked the armor below it. He could have easily been a merchant, traveling to another city to sell his wares, just a simple man heading to the horizon to return with the dawn.

Instead, she knew of the life he had been called to, what he had chosen for himself, for them. Soon he would learn of blood, fire, and loss, molded into this new life. Masking it under cloth was just almost enough to fool her into thinking that he might, someday, come back.

Over time, she heard all the tales from the world - of the grand adventures in songs and dance, one ballad after another on how his journey could only lead to victory. She didn’t need to know the future to know the truth - that these songs were nothing but lies.

When they came to her door, she didn’t need to hear their words to know what they were saying. She took the scarf woven out of blue and folded it in her hands, studying the blood droplets on the threads. No prayer in the world could have stopped death from finding him, and she’d been a fool to think that anyone could be spared that fate.

She’d sworn long ago to Andraste that her end of the road would be silent, a story forgotten by the bards. She’d sworn that her time would be simple, a dressed up fantasy that she’d make into reality. She’d sworn she would have a love that outweighed the blood that coated her ledger, covered up the crimes of her past.

It was under a blue sky where she found the weapons she’d hidden away, wrapped the scarf around her wrist and weighed the danger of returning to a world once forgotten. She sang her song quietly, to herself and to him, the words to a song that meant everything. 

No blade would stop her from joining him on his road, to find the heart of the beast that took him. She’d once left this path behind, set down the weapons of war and begged for redemption. But now there was no redemption, nothing to take her back.

Even if it was her end, she would find it – she would find that shred of blue.


End file.
